For many years, we have lived in a culture where intellect is highly valued. The type of intellect valued the most has been related to topics taught in schools (science, mathematics, language, music, history, etc.). When someone excels in these areas, they are highly rewarded throughout society. We often score people’s intelligence through grades, assignments, essays, and IQ tests. The problem with these standards is that it does not consider other types of intelligence, including emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is someone’s ability to understand, identify, and manage the emotions of themselves and others. Often these people are empathetic, caring, good at picking up on subtilties in the environment, reading social cues, working in groups and being leaders/managers. All these skills have been essential in human evolution throughout centuries. Humans have never been a species that thrive well individually. We have advanced so much as a society because we have worked together to hunt, take care of children, build communities, and fight off enemies. Evolutionary scientists believe that the packs that stuck together, were the ones that continued to survive.
There are many ways that we can foster emotional intelligence when raising children, some of these are outlines below:
Helping children identify their emotions: We can help children identify their emotions through helping them put a name to their experience. If they are yelling, we might say “I can see that you are mad right now”. We can also do this by identifying emotions of others. This can be done through naming our emotions, or when they show up on TV, in movies, or when out in public. Statements could include “mommy was so sad when you took her toy” or “Bluey looked angry when his dad said that”. This can be enhanced by pointing out facial cues for these emotions: frown and tears = sad, eyebrows down= angry, smile = happy.
We can help children understand body clues: Body clues are signals that our body sends us to communicate our emotions. For example, butterflies in my stomach might indicate that I am worried, or my muscles being tight could mean that I am angry. Every person has their own body clues, and we can explore this with children to get them more in touch with their emotions and what it feels like for them. In therapy, we sometimes become a feelings detective or scientist and look for these clues.
Perspective taking: When children are young, they struggle to understand how actions might impact situations. This can become more complex when a child struggles with a learning difficulty or ADHD. In these contexts, children tend to be more impulsive and thinking ahead might be more difficult. We can help children learn about other people’s perspectives through having discussions about how a series of events unfolded and learning that emotions can be contagious. For example, many children often understand that when they are angry, other people get angry as well. Having these discussions repeatedly over time can make a difference. It is important to note that these discussions are important to have once the child’s big emotion has returned to baseline. When their emotions are at their peak, asking them to engage in front lobe thinking can make the problem worse. These conversations can also be done by asking a child to think of different ways that they could have responded.
Modelling healthy coping strategies: we can help children learn effective ways to manage their emotions by modeling healthy coping ourselves. We can show them that we also need to go for a walk, take a break, take a deep breath, or play with our toys to help our emotions calm down. If we make a mistake, we can always go back and apologize for not doing a healthy coping mechanism. Apologizing helps our children understand that we all make mistakes, and we are allowed to own up to those mistakes. We can also model pro-social behaviour such as compromising, sharing, looking at other people’s perspectives and empathy.
Allowing children to feel their emotions: often emotions are not the problem, and it is the behaviours that come from these emotions. A child hitting their sibling is the thing we want to work on, versus the feeling of anger. A quote that I often like is “being permissive with emotions and setting limits with behaviours”. We want our children to know what it is like to experience a range of emotions: creativity, imagination, happy, sad, angry, excited, worried, etc. What we want to help them understand is that we often have more control on how we respond to these emotions, and with time, patience, and understanding we can help them find effective coping mechanisms.
There are many ways that we can enhance our own emotional intelligence and foster it in the youth moving forward. Having positive mental health and high emotional intelligence can have many wonderful effects on our lives.
